Archive for April, 2014

Time Inc. revenue increased to $745 million in the first three months of this year, up 1% from the the period a year ago, parent Time Warner said Wednesday. Subscription dollars rose 5% to $270 million. Ad sales were essentially flat at $390 million.

But its year-over-year comparisons were helped, again, by the company’s acquisition of American Express Publishing last October. That brought magazines including Travel & Leisure and Food & Wine into a portfolio of brands isuch as Sports Illustrated, Fortune, InStyle and Time. Both Time and People published an additional issue in the first quarter, also helping lift revenue.

If you look only at continuing operations and don’t count the additional cash from American Express Publishing, revenue would have fallen 5%, with advertising down 7% and subscriptions flat.

The streaming video service will announce a new program called “Tightrope” from Emmy-winning “Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston during its NewFronts presentation on Wednesday, according to people familiar with the matter.

The service has also signed NBC’s “Football Night in America” anchor Dan Patrick to host a revived “Sports Jeopardy” and a program called “Throwaways” with Oscar-nominated actor Jeremy Renner, the people said.

Today’s new power partnership has tech teams and brand builders working together to create cohesive cross-platform customer experiences and drive the bottom line.

That’s the theme of Ad Age’s second annual Marketing + Tech Summit, which is being held during Internet Week New York. Leading marketers and technologists will come together May 21 at The Altman Building in Manhattan to discuss how technology is reshaping the roles and responsibilities of both CMOs and CIOs and the relationships between marketing and IT.

Amid a swell of criticism over domestic violence allegations against founder and CEO Gurbaksh Chahal, ad tech company RadiumOne said on Sunday that it had replaced Mr. Chahal as CEO. Bill Lonergan, chief operating officer, was named to succeed him.

“At a board meeting yesterday evening, RadiumOne’s board of directors voted to terminate the employment of Gurbaksh Chahal as CEO and Chairman of the company,” the company said in a statement confirming a report by Re/code. “Bill Lonergan, the company COO, will take over as CEO of the Company immediately. Bill has an extraordinary professional background and has helped build Blue Lithium and RadiumOne into industry leading brands. We are confident he will continue Radium One’s impressive trajectory.”

The company had come under increasing fire after Mr. Chahal reportedly pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor battery charges related to allegations that he had assaulted his girlfriend.

You’d think a car company wouldn’t run a spot showing a pooch run over by one of its vehicles, right? Wrong.

But Subaru of America will be pushing a spot created by Russian agency Smetana in St. Petersburg that depicts just that scenario. There is, of course, a surprise twist: The dog set the whole thing up in order to steal a Subaru and take it for a wild ride.

The commercial, for Subaru’s importer in Russia, starts off as a typical dash-cam video — which are ubiquitous in Russia — showing a woman driving down a dark road at night. Suddenly, she runs over a dog that has darted out in the middle of the road. Trying to do the right thing, the woman stops her car, backs up and gets out to check on the poor pooch.

Ladies’ Home Journal, an icon of American publishing and cornerstone of what were once called the “Seven Sisters” of women’s magazines, will cease monthly publication after 131 years, parent company Meredith confirmed Thursday.

The magazine will become a special interest publication sold on newsstands, according to Meredith spokesman Art Slusark. The company’s current plan is not to sell subscriptions, he added.

The July issue will be its last as a monthly, with the special interest publication slated to appear on newsstands in the fall. The website will also continue to publish.

New York magazine’s website was down for many users on Wednesday afternoon, the result of a “technical glitch,” a spokeswoman said, declining to elaborate on the cause of the problem. A staffer said the problem wasn’t anything as embarrassing as forgetting to renew the domain name.

The spokeswoman said the problem had been fixed, though at 2 p.m., about two hours after the outage began, NYMag.com continued to show some visitors a generic depository of magazine-related links from Network Solutions, a company that hosts web domains, or just failed to load properly.

Gawker also offered Network Solutions $25 for the address “if New York magazine no longer wants it.”